In Dumbo, Town Houses in a Warehouse Zone

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CONTEXTUAL A facade of concrete and glass will contain a group of four-bedroom town homes on Pearl and Water Streets, an area better known for converted loft spaces. Construction is set to begin this summer.CreditCreditAlloy

By Alison Gregor

July 5, 2013

A group of town houses hidden behind a unified facade of concrete and glass in formerly industrial Dumbo has some calling the edifice a future landmark — and others saying it’s reminiscent of a 1970s-era office building.

The first 3,049-square-foot town house in the project, which will be a collection of five homes called Dumbo Townhouses at Pearl and Water Streets in Brooklyn, went into contract last month, before construction started, at the full asking price of $4.1 million. At $1,345 a square foot, the price is more than double the average per square foot of a Brooklyn brownstone or condominium.

The project will create town houses in a neighborhood better known for converted loft spaces, but will do so in a way that allows the homes to blend in with the area’s industrial aesthetic.

The developer, Alloy LLC, says construction is set to begin this summer on the four-bedroom three-bathroom town houses, which in renderings appear to have a single facade of ductal concrete fins separating floor-to-ceiling windows. While the upper floors of the five-story town houses give the impression of an office building or warehouse, the ground floor has a wooden exterior with discrete entranceways.

“In general, these don’t look like ‘Cosby Show’ brownstones,” said AJ Pires, an executive vice president of Alloy, a real estate development company based in Dumbo with about a dozen employees. “Inside, the town houses are actually somewhat traditionally laid out, but the exterior materials are more contemporary.”

The ground floor in each town house will have a bedroom and bath, with a private garage to the rear. The parlor floor, which will have 20-foot ceilings, will house a living room, a dining room and an open kitchen that leads to a garden terrace. The third floor will be an open landing off a floating stairway. The fourth will have the master bedroom and bath, while the fifth will have two bedrooms and a bath. A stairway will lead to a roof terrace with a covered dining area.

The location of the project falls within the Dumbo Historic District, which was created in 2007 and protects about 90 buildings, mostly industrial, dating from around 1880 to 1920, so the developers had to obtain approval from the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission. The five town houses will replace a one-story garage built in the 1950s that is being demolished, Mr. Pires said.

Alloy has previously converted two warehouse buildings to loft apartments in historic Dumbo. The developers said, though, that the design of the Dumbo Townhouses, being built from scratch, presented a challenge. Alloy decided against creating the 12-story building it could by rights have put up on the lot, leaving about half the zoned square footage unused — an unusual move for property developers.

A 12-story building would have been “way out of scale and not really appropriate,” Mr. Pires said, because “the scale of neighboring buildings is right around that three-, four-, five-story world.”

The landmarks commission supported not only the scale of the project, but also the rather unexpected use of concrete for the facade. Jared Della Valle, the president of Alloy, says that a handful of concrete buildings in the Dumbo historic district are some of the earliest in the city, including 20 Jay Street where Alloy has its offices, and that these served as a precedent.

The design of the Dumbo Townhouses “completely fits in with the neighborhood,” he said, “but it doesn’t duplicate the material qualities or details of the old buildings. It’s invented a new version that fits within the context of the neighborhood.”

The commission agreed; at a meeting March 12, Frederick Bland, a commissioner, even commented that the town houses were “a little landmark in the making.” Mr. Bland said he particularly appreciated the camouflaging of the town houses in a neighborhood where town houses would be out of context.

Mr. Della Valle said Alloy went with town houses as opposed to apartments because they would maximize the value of the square footage — which was necessary since development rights were going unused.

“There’s no elevator core, common stairways or machine rooms in town houses,” he said, “and we’re not building any square foot that we’re not selling.”

Besides the large windows, Alloy incorporated several skylights, including one in the master bedroom over the bed area, to make the town houses light and airy. Floors will be limestone and obsidian oak, and bathrooms will have marble slabs and glass panels, giving the homes a sleek, minimalist feel. The living room and master bedroom will have gas fireplaces.

Reaction to renderings of the town houses so far has been polarized, with some online commenters calling them “gorgeous” and others spurning the project as reminiscent of an “ugly office building from the ’70s.”

Ted Moncreiff, a 10-year Dumbo resident who recently bought a condo at 192 Water Street, another Alloy project, said that he appreciated the subtle reinterpretation of the area’s industrial themes in the town houses and that he hadn’t heard any criticism within the tightknit Dumbo community.

“There’s some pretty hideous contemporary architecture that’s been put up in the neighborhood,” he said. “If these were badly done modernism, I would probably be singing a different tune, but I like the renderings.”

Alloy, which never actively marketed its first two Dumbo projects, recently listed a second town house at an even higher price of $4.3 million, or $1,410 a square foot. “We’re seeing velocity when we’re not really asking for it,” Mr. Della Valle said. “So we’ll see, but those numbers are likely to move from where they are now — and they’re not going to go down.”